


For Honour, For Money

by halfeatenmoon



Category: Star Wars (Marvel Comics)
Genre: F/M, Monster Hunters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-23 22:22:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17088839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfeatenmoon/pseuds/halfeatenmoon
Summary: Nokk and Winloss take a job so simple that it's almost beneath them. Aphra manages to make it complicated anyway.





	For Honour, For Money

**Author's Note:**

  * For [serenityabrin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenityabrin/gifts).



Nokk was not happy about taking this job. It was not befitting their status as the most sought-after monster hunters in their sector. It was neither challenging nor dangerous. It was _embarrassing_. Winloss would have thought she didn’t want to do it at all, except that she was the one who had accepted the job.

“Why did I agree to this?” she growled, as their ship came gently down to rest in the dock of the Imperial star destroyer Captor.

Winloss was piloting solo, as he often did on easy manoeuvres. Four arms were the normal amount used to pilot a ship, after all, and it was useful to leave Nokk alone during landings so that she could get her weaponry in order. Although that was a problem in itself when none of their weapons seemed up to the job.

With the ship settled and powering down, Winloss ducked through the cockpit opening to join Nokk in the armory and storage space just behind it. Nokk was staring at their array of weapons, looking utterly folorn.

“Stunners on low charge?” he suggested, gently.

She made a flicking motion with her tongue, the Trandoshan equivalent of shaking her head. “I don’t know whether they can even survive that. We might have to do this by hand. Damn it, why would they call us for this? They should be getting exterminators in, not monster hunters.”

“But exterminators kill, and they want them alive. After all, that’s what we’re known for, apart from being the best.”

“Why would you even take these things alive? Ugh.” She flicked her tongue again. “Why would I say yes to a job to capture an unknown number of _Tookas?_ ”

Winloss smiled and scratched the back of her neck, the place where her scales often flaked. She crooned and tilted her head back, leaning into it. “I believe it was because they offered us an astronomical amount of money.”

“Oh, yeah,” Nokk said with a sigh. “That would do it.”

 

They hadn’t asked their client why an Imperial ship was overrun with hundreds of Tookas. It wasn’t their place to ask. Nor was it their place to ask why the captain who hired them wanted them to  _capture_ all the feral Tookas running around their ventilation system and take them to a planetside Imperial base. It was simply time to do a job and get paid.

Winloss did have some theories on why they wanted so many live Tookas, though. It didn’t help them catch any, but it did help lighten the mood when they were six hours into the job and up to their knees in garbage.

“They’re a weapons experiment gone wrong,” Winloss said, as he plunged one of his prosthetic arms into the garbage heap again.

Nokk’s gaze was blank and her tone flat when she said, “We’re hunting weaponised Tookas.”

“Yep, someone tried to make them weapons and it all went wrong. That’s why that need them alive.”

Winloss pulled up his arm again, empty-handed.

“They’re good at escaping.”

“Come on, honey, I need your ears to help me track here. I don’t have feeling in the clamps and my computer systems can only do so much.”

“You can’t heat track?”

“Well, garbage generates a lot of heat as it decomposes, so…”

“Ugh.” Nokk shook her head, but she closed her eyes and tilted her head slightly. “Nothing. It must have gone quiet.”

They were both silent for a moment until Winloss said, “One of the Tookas is the captain’s daughter’s pet that she desperately wants to get back, but it got loose in here with another Tooka and they bred like mad so nobody knows which Tooka is the right one.”

“You humans are so weird about your offspring,” Nokk said, with a small trill of affection at the back of her throat. “I’ll never understand such pandering. Just leave them in some hot sand and let them figure it out.”

“I promise if we ever adopt some offspring, we’ll leave it in the wilderness immediately to make sure it can find its way back to us.”

Nokk snorted. “You’d take a droid in from a light rain, you hopeless warmblood. You’d never let a child out of our sight.”

“Hey, droids are different! I know how it feels getting rain in metal joints, I’ve lived it.” He flexed his shoulders and his arms rattled.

Before he could get another word in, though, Nokk straightened her neck, focused hard on a spot just to Winloss’s left. “There, two feet deep.”

His grabber arm shot out again, with his cybernetic legs plunging deep into the garbage heap to gain traction, and this time he came up victorious.

“Take that,” he addressed the squirming blue creature. “You’re ours now, kiddo.”

“We are _not_ adopting a Tooka as our child!”

“No, no, of course not. I just meant…”

“After this job, I’d be happy if I never saw these creatures again,” Nokk grumbled, as she held open a carry cage and Winloss stuffed it inside. “Honestly. I don’t even want to touch fur ever again.”

“You’re going to forget that in about five minutes when you want a kiss,” Winloss said, smugly stroking his beard.

“I don’t think so.”

“Really?” He grinned. “Because we still have to do a manual check, but going by my readings, that’s the last Tooka in this sector… which means we only have one sector left to search. And it’s one without any garbage repositories.”

Nokk stared at him for a long moment. “Okay, you’ve got me.” She rubbed her face gently against his beard. “Your fur is nice, though. Scratchy. Not like those fluffy beasts.”

He chuckled. “Till the stars come down?”

“Always,” Nokk sighed. Then, “Beloved, I’m overjoyed to be nearly done with this job, but it would also be lovely to get out of this garbage chute.”

 

The last sector was the soldiers’ barracks. Easy and sterile, with each bedroom locking individually; there was something to be said for military discipline and closed doors when you were hunting down an invasive species. It was a simple matter of going from door to door to sweep for any last Tookas, then sweeping the ventilation for the area for the same. Very, very simple, until they got to the eighth room and found a familiar figure standing on a bed and stuffing a purple Tooka down her shirt. Within moments, Winloss had two of Doctor Aphra’s limbs clamped in his grabber arms and Nokk had a gun pointed in her face.

“Hey guys,” said Aphra, cheerfully. “Looks like you found yourself a neat little job here.”

“Looks like you found yourself at a dead end,” Winloss said, just as cheerfully. “Emphasis on dead.”

“You won’t do that, you’re pacifists. You don’t kill.”

“I don’t kill monsters, because they’re beautiful, innocent creatures just doing what the universe designed them to do.” Nokk stared straight down the barrel of her blaster and into Aphra's eyes. “You, on the other hand, are asking for it.”

“Right.” Aphra faltered. “But what would your Imperial hosts think if you killed me on their property?”

Winloss pulled up a holo comm with one of his spare arms. “Good question. Let’s contact them and ask.”

“No!” Aphra yelled. “Okay. Look. We don’t need to get them involved in this! We can make a deal. I’ll help you out with the job and we can split the money.”

“We don’t need help.”

“Okay, think of it this way. You’ve been contracted to clear all the Tookas out, right? So it would be a shame if after you left, someone released a couple more and in a cycle’s time they were back to the previous population, right? The Empire would be furious, and your reputation, well…”

“Our reputation is fine,” Nokk growled.

Winloss grinned. This was more fun than he expected. “Yes, thanks to you, our business is booming. We’re the only hunters in our sector now, and we’ve become very popular since taking down the beast on X3, even though we still turn down kill jobs. It’s really thanks to you that we got such a high paying job as this one.”

Aphra swallowed. “I can help you out with the job, and we can split the money?”

“Your bargaining position really isn’t as good as you think it is,” Winloss said, as if they didn't have a weapon trained at her and were haggling over the corner table in a cantina. He met Nokk’s eyes and blinked, carefully. As much as Aphra had wronged them, she had really helped their career along. And they didn’t really want t kill, even someone like her.

Nokk stared back at him for a long moment, and finally flicked her tongue just slightly. Then she grabbed Aphra by the chin and said, “How about you help us make sure we’ve truly cleared the ship of Tookas, since you’re so skilled with them and all, and you pay back the money you owe us."

"And in return, you'll pass on some information? And invite me on your next lucrative job?"

"In return, we won't tell the Imperials that you're here."

“Okay, sure.” Aphra said, weakly. “That sounds like a deal.”

Their eyes met over her head. Nokk’s expression clearly said _She’s going to double cross us anyway._ Winloss hoped his eyebrows could convey _As long as we get out with all the cargo intact, we’ll be fine._

 

Two hours later, Winloss realised that getting out with the cargo intact was not, in fact, anything that they could count on.

Aphra’s assistance had truly been valuable, to the grudging respect of the hunters. She did have more experience with Tookas than they did, and she was adept at sneaking into small spaces and spotting the traces they'd left behind. With her help, they picked up several Tookas that Winloss and Nokk otherwise would have missed. It only went pear-shaped when they came across a unit on parade and they drew their blasters, confirming their unsurprising hypothesis that Aphra was not well loved by the Imperial Army.

They could have probably all worked it out, except that the soldiers didn’t stop to ask questions, Aphra followed them back to their ship, and she ultimately decided to secure their exit by blowing up a group of troopers.

“I can’t believe we didn’t see that coming,” Nokk growled, as their ship sped away from the Star Destroyer as fast as humanly possible. They were co-piloting this time, with Winloss using one mechanical arm to hold on to Aphra’s arm and keep her pinned to the wall.

“I don’t see anyone could have expected her to blow up the docking bay by throwing a Tooka at them and yelling ‘Snugglebum Oogie Woogie’, dear.”

“No more extermination jobs. Ever. Again.”

On that, Winloss had to agree.

“Well, we’re all out safe and so are the Tookas,” Aphra said, brightly. “So, all’s well that ends well, right?”

Nokk punched them into hyperspace and then stood up, stretched, and stared her down with a long, hard gaze. “No, Doctor, I don’t believe it is. We were supposed to get paid for this job, and I don’t see how that’s going to go down smoothly when you left an explosion in our wake.”

“Oh well. But… you saved all these Tookas! Still a great outcome!”

“Except the one that you killed to facilitate your own escape,” she hissed. “How do you think a couple of conservationists were going to feel about that?”

“Er… hopefully like there’s been enough killing for one day?”

Winloss walked her backwards to the lounge, and cuffed her into a chain that they kept attached to the wall for the occasional appropriate monster (and sometimes for entertainment on long flights). “We’ll see about that after we get paid.”

He nodded at Nokk, who punched in the details for a holo-call to their client. As they waited to connect, he whispered, “I think I was right, you know.”

“What’s that?”

“The reason the Empire wanted us to hunt Tookas. They are a weapons experiment gone a bit rogue.”

Nokk snorted. “You have a terrible mind. It helps that sometimes it’s right.”

“It only helps me understand the dark minds of some of the people we work with. All the better to handle it. And you love my mind.”

She put an arm about his shoulders and quickly nuzzled his cheek. “Til the stars fall down.”

“Til the stars fall down,” he echoed, just before the communicator crackled to life.

“Captain,” Nokk addressed the holo message with a formal bow. “I regret to tell you that our mission has at least partially failed. While the ship is now clear of Tookas and we have a good stock of them ready for delivery, unfortunately one of them was… detonated.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I didn’t give you the code word.”

“You knew they could detonate and you didn’t think to mention it?” Winloss demanded, his voice high. Nokk put a reassuring hand on his chest.

“Captain, it was an unknown agent who triggered the detonation. Unfortunately due to the confusion, and the agent retreating to our ship, we have had to retreat to avoid further combat. We understand, of course, that this is an undesirable outcome and will compromise our payment.” She bowed her head. “However, we had hoped that we may still come to an agreement if we deliver the remaining Tookas - and the culprit for the detonation.”

“You’re the worst,” Aphra grumbled, as they hauled her into the line of sight. But she smiled as soon as she saw the face in the holo. “Oh. Hello there, sir. Nice to see you again.”

The captain’s face twitched as she examined Aphra. “I thought as much.”

“I guess this makes sense,” Winloss said, with a sigh. “You wanted the Tookas off the ship because you knew they could explode, and she wanted to weaponise them. What do you say though, Captain? Can we come to an agreement about payment?”

“Oh, yes,” said the captain, with a small smile, never taking her eyes off the prisoner. “We can certainly make a deal.”


End file.
